The globalizing city in the time of Hindutva: The politics of urban development and citizenship in Ahmedabad, India
[Thesis]
;supervisor: AlSayyad, Nezar
University of California, Berkeley: United States -- California
: 2008
363 pages
Ph.D.
, University of California, Berkeley: United States -- California
Ahmedabad, India's seventh largest city and the largest city of the western state of Gujarat, has been gradually re-imagined over the past decade. Today, the dominant discourse around the city could not be further from the question of whether it is a "dying city," a debate that had emerged in the late 1980s due to the decline of its cotton textile industry, but also giving expression to other concerns such as Hindu-Muslim riots in the city. This dissertation argues that central to the city's re-imagining have been practices that discursively and materially remake it in the image of a post-industrial city, an image which has come to signify a city's ability to compete in the new global economy and indeed to partake in a global urban modernity. The dissertation studies Ahmedabad's post-industrial remaking, the practices that constitute this remaking and the actors shaping them, the inclusions and exclusions that they produce and contestations to them.Significantly, Ahmedabad's post-industrial remaking has taken place at the same time as religious divides have become more deeply entrenched in the city through the violence of Hindutva politics, which over the past four decades has produced an urban landscape marked by geographies of violence, fear and segregation. The 2002 Gujarat riots put a final seal to these divides and were unprecedented due to both the systematic manner in which they targeted Muslims and the role of the Gujarat Government--with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at its helm--in supporting violence against Muslims. The dissertation asserts that the city's post-industrial remaking cannot be understood independently of the city's remaking by Hindutva politics. It conceptualizes Ahmedabad at the turn of the 21 st century as a "globalizing city in the time of Hindutva" and interrogates how these two remakings of the city interact with one another and how this reshapes the city's landscape.Research was carried out on urban discourses produced around the city and practices of urban redevelopment on the city's riverfront and its textile mill lands. The dissertation begins with an introductory chapter that discusses the historical and theoretical background to the study. Chapter 2 interrogates the politics of urban representations by examining urban discourses that promote the city and envision its future and the ideologies of development that they articulate. Chapter 3 interrogates the politics of planning and developing the city's riverfront and Chapter 4 interrogates the politics of protest around the issue of slum displacement and resettlement on the city's riverfront. Chapter 5 interrogates the politics of redeveloping the textile mill lands which are symbolically on the margins of the contemporary city. The dissertation argues that the city's post-industrial remaking and the city's remaking by Hindutva politics intersect in complex ways, involving both overlaps and frictions. However, while some housing struggles in the city have articulated a challenge to Hindutva politics, the practices that constitute Ahmedabad's post-industrial remaking are likely to reproduce rather than pose a challenge to both the vectors of marginalization and exclusion that are at the heart of Hindutva politics and the geographies of segregation that mark the communalized city.